by Kelly Meding
"You can show me right now?"
"Yes. In exchange for a job."
"I can't guarantee a job, but good information will go a long way toward pleading your case with the people who can." I thought back to my half-eaten sandwich and the desperate, hungry look in Peter's eyes. Might as well try to help Alejandro out. "We do pay our informants, though. In cash, not in employment."
"It's a start."
He showed signs of a good Hunter and he probably would have made a passable one someday, had Boot Camp survived. I finally let him go, stepped back, and dug out my phone.
"Who are you calling?" he asked.
"Backup. We're not going goblin hunting alone, Junior."
"Ale."
"Fine, Ale." The Spanish pronunciation didn't exactly roll off my tongue, but I did my best.
The other line only rang twice between Tybalt picked up with a grumpy, "Monahan."
"It's Stone. You busy?"
"Not at the moment. What's going on?"
"Grab some people and meet me at the Carter Street Bakery. I've got a lead on a goblin."
Chapter Eleven
8:50 p.m.
In the twenty or so minutes it took for our ride to arrive, Wyatt called briefly to tell me he was all right, to not worry, and that he'd contact me soon. Only my absolute confidence in his ability to handle himself, even around three flighty teenage Lupa who'd hurt him once already, allowed me to hang up without insisting he provide more details. I trusted him to know what he was doing.
I still didn't totally trust my new BFF Alejandro—only time would gain him that—but I did buy him a sandwich at the coffee shop while we waited. He inhaled that sucker like he hadn't eaten in days. So many of the Hunters I'd trained with, the Hunters I'd known through the Triads, could have easily been him if Bastian hadn't found us—lost, starving, with no real hope for the future.
Not that being a Hunter had promised us much of a future, but we never went hungry or wanted for a place to sleep.
Tybalt's Explorer pulled up, already full of Kyle, Shelby, and Marcus. After a little rearranging of seats, I took the front passenger seat, while Alejandro kicked Shelby all the way into the rear compartment. The kid looked terrified to be surrounded by Therians—a feeling I might have shared once upon a time and kind of sympathized with.
I gave everyone the bullet points.
"A goblin Queen, huh?" Tybalt said. "Impressive."
"Not if you know what to look for," Alejandro said. He even managed a little bravado through his fear. "I was two weeks from finishing at Boot Camp. I haven't forgotten a thing they taught me there."
Tybalt glanced at me, as if to verify the claim. I shrugged. We had no way to check up on Alejandro. All Boot Camp records had been destroyed the day we tore it all down. The last thing we needed was all of that information falling into the wrong hands. Giving it up voluntarily was the lesser of two evils.
"Where to, Junior?" I asked.
He scowled at me in the rearview. "Head west, toward the Black River docks."
As we headed out of the center of Mercy's Lot, the streetlights became fewer and farther between. The area between it and the river was mostly made up of factories and industrial centers, some functioning and most not. It was quiet out there this time of night, with the daytime shifts gone home and the nighttime shifts firmly entrenched in their duties. Nearer to the docks, a sense of wicked familiarity washed over me and not just because I'd been here five dozen times in the past.
I knew where we were going, and it hit me with a sickening kind of clarity.
The last time I came to this area to see the gremlins, I'd been with Baylor, and the memory sent a shot of grief right to my heart. We'd been looking for information on Thackery and his menagerie of Lupa pups. Ironic because the Lupa were now in Wyatt's custody, and I hadn't brought any sort of snack to feed the gremlins' collective sweet tooth. If a goblin Queen had been in the area, they wouldn't tell without a treat.
My instincts proved me right when Alejandro's directions landed us in front of the gremlin factory—a long, narrow building with four stories of papered-over windows. A chain-link fence surrounded it, the only entrance an old guard hut that still worked. They'd let us inside that way before.
Something about the place felt off, though, and I couldn't put my finger on it.
"You tracked the goblin to an old factory?" Marcus asked.
"Yes," Alejandro said. "She went into that hut, and then a few seconds later the fence rolled back a little bit. It closed again before I could slip inside."
"Did you see her leave again?"
"No."
"How long was she inside?"
Alejandro squirmed, and I almost felt sorry for him. Marcus had his full-on intimidation face going, and he could be a scary interrogator. "I'm not sure."
I twisted around in my seat to face them. "Let me guess. You didn't hang around to see what she was doing or how long she stayed, because you didn't know if an entire horde of goblins was inside waiting to eat you, right?"
He blushed, then nodded.
"Good instinct. Death by goblin is not a nice way to go, trust me. But you were wrong."
"What?" he asked. "How do you know?"
"Because a couple thousand gremlins live in there, not goblins. The only things gremlins like to eat are sugar and junk food."
"Oh." Alejandro glanced at Tybalt. "How does she know this stuff?"
Tybalt chuckled.
"So should we try the gate?" Marcus asked. "Or idle here and discuss it further?"
Tybalt drove up to the guard hut. I climbed out and went inside. The controls seemed simple enough, and I hit a red button that said Call. I expected a buzzer or beep, something to indicate the call went through. I held it down and said, "Ballengee be blessed," which is the traditional gremlin greeting.
Nothing.
I tried it again to more silence, which unnerved me. I hit a few other buttons, but nothing seemed to be working. The hut was free of electricity, and then I realized that's what bothered me about the place. It was nighttime and dark outside, and there wasn't a single indication of light or power about the place. It felt abandoned.
Had the gremlins packed up and left town, too?
I went outside and manually tugged on the gate. It surprised me by rolling back on its track. Definitely not good. Tybalt drove inside, picked me up, and we trekked across a narrow strip of parking lot. Last time a garage door on the south side of the building had opened automatically. Nothing happened tonight.
"This isn't right," I said. "Stay on your toes, boys."
Tybalt parked near a side door that had once said Authorized Personnel Only and had faded to only every other letter. We piled out of the SUV. Marcus, Kyle and Shelby immediately turned toward the building and sniffed the air. All I smelled was oil, rubber, and the far away odor of the river. Beneath it all was the familiar, cloying stink of gremlin piss—like whiskey, only more eye-watering and less enjoyable to drink.
"I smell death," Marcus said.
Terrific.
I pulled a knife from my ankle sheath, while Tybalt fixed a wicked double-blade attachment to his prosthetic hand. Marcus stripped and shifted into his jaguar form, while Kyle and Shelby stayed in their clothes. We gave Alejandro a hunting knife from the weapons stash in the back so the kid wasn't completely helpless. The three of us humans, with our poorer eyesight, also grabbed flashlights.
The door wasn't locked, and it opened with a groan when Tybalt pushed. A gust of hot, stale air stole outside, carrying the stink of gremlin piss and rot. My nose tingled with it, and I held back a sneeze.
This isn't going to be good.
I went in first, alert for anything. My yellow beam of light flashed down an empty corridor, its concrete walls and floor stained here and there with indescribable colors. The air became more ripe, more suffocating the deeper into the factory we went. Twenty feet of corridor ended at a large metal door that said Floor. I stopped to listen.
/> Normally this close to the gremlins' nests, I'd hear the scratchy scampering of thousands of small clawed feet, the chattering of their guttural language. That many gremlins in an enclosed chamber created a hell of a lot of noise.
Marcus nudged his big furry body up to the front, then crouched down, ready to leap at anything that might be on the other side of the door. Kyle pushed Alejandro into the rear. I grabbed the door handle and pulled.
The nightmare we found inside was unimaginable.
The gremlins hadn't just been slaughtered, they'd been destroyed. A layer of blood had congealed on the factory floor like gelatin, its surface roughly dotted with arms, legs, pointed ears, bit of hair, and other meaty, disgusting things. Nothing inside moved. The smell nearly made me double over. My eyes watered, and I told myself it was the stink and not actual tears.
I made it five steps inside, my sneakers squishing on the blood, before I froze and couldn't go any farther. There was no point. All we'd find were more filleted gremlins, more blood and gore.
"Jesus Christ," Tybalt said. "All of them?"
"A lot of them," I said. It was impossible to know if they'd all been killed or if some had managed to escape.
"One goblin couldn't do all this."
"No, but one goblin is all it takes to open up sewer access and allow a horde inside."
"Stone," Kyle said. He pointed at the high wall of a metal vat that was probably full of gremlin piss. "There."
I shined my flashlight in that direction. Written in gremlin blood was the word Kelsa. "Well, shit," I said.
The goblins were definitely making a statement. I took a few pictures with my phone.
Marcus backed out of the factory floor. Kyle and Shelby were both looking a little green. I recalled the way Phineas had reacted to the gremlins several months ago—an instinctual revulsion, he'd said. He'd run outside and vomited in the grass. Looked like all Therians had a similar allergic reaction to goblin piss.
"Take a breather," I told them. "Tybalt, Ale, and I will check for an entry point."
"We will?" Alejandro said.
"Suck it up, Junior, this is part of the job."
We didn't find an entry or exit point, for all of our searching. The closest we came was a trail of bloody footprints leading into a basement room full of metal pipes of all shapes and sizes. More blood had been splashed around the floor and walls, making it impossible to track the footprints into any single pipe.
Alejandro and I sat on those pipes while Tybalt retrieved something from the car. He set the explosives to go off in that room, then put the timer on five minutes. We were a block away from the factory when we felt the ground shake. Tybalt pulled off into an empty parking lot and we watched the flames rise high into the night sky.
The fire probably wouldn't go far enough into the sewers to touch the goblins, but we couldn't leave that sort of mess around for the human authorities. We may have very well wiped away all proof that gremlins had ever existed in the world, but I couldn't think about that. I wanted to imagine some had escaped and were searching for a new place to live—or better yet, had fled to another city altogether.
Thanks to their affiliation with me, another species of creature was facing total extinction.
"This wasn't your fault," Tybalt said, as if he could read my thoughts.
"Something tells me the gremlins wouldn't agree with you," I replied, unable to mask the bitterness in my voice. "And that little love note the goblins left behind tells another story."
He quit trying to change my mind, and since we still had the matter of Alejandro to deal with, I called Astrid. Explained who Alejandro was, the information he'd given us, and the results.
"Do you trust him?" Astrid asked.
"He hasn't given me a reason not to." I turned to give Alejandro a pointed look, and he went a little wide-eyed.
"Blindfold him and bring him in."
"All right."
"Have you heard from Truman recently?"
"Not in the last hour or so. He's made some progress on that, uh, pet project of his."
She didn't have to be so cryptic on her end. "The Lupa?"
"Yeah."
"He has them?"
"Made contact."
"Stone—"
"That's all I know. He didn't want me directly involved."
She made an all-too-familiar noise of frustration. "Fine. Bring the newbie to Ops when you get back. I want the others to stay out in the field."
"Will do."
I gave Alejandro the good news and relayed Astrid's orders. My next call was to Wyatt, who didn't pick up. I left a terse message to call me or else. Alejandro didn't protest being blindfolded. We didn't talk on the drive back across town to the Watchtower. Tybalt dropped us off inside the parking area.
Marcus didn't seem particularly pleased with having to leave right away. As I climbed out of the SUV, I met his worried copper eyes and mouthed "I'll check on him."
He nodded.
After the SUV left, I yanked off Alejandro's blindfold. He stared all around us as I led him down the old mall's corridor to Ops. If he recognized the place—and no reason he should, since he'd have been a toddler when it was last a functioning retail site—he didn't say so. People stared as we passed, suspicion in their eyes, directed at the stranger in their sanctuary. Therian noses twitched because we had to stink to high hell from our walk through the factory of death.
Astrid and Rufus met us inside Ops. Alejandro did an admirable job of not looking like he wanted to shit his pants when Astrid politely asked me to let them take it from here. I knew she only wanted to question him about Boot Camp and everything he knew about the goblin Queen he'd tracked, but he didn't. Poor kid.
Wyatt still hadn't called me back, so I took a few minutes to shower off the odor of death and change my clothes. Feeling a lot less grungy, I headed for the infirmary to check on Milo—not only for Marcus, but for my own peace of mind, too.
One person was in the infirmary waiting area when I walked in, curled up in a chair, looking as lost as I'd ever seen her. Gina Kismet didn't wear helpless well, and worse, she didn't try to hide it when I spotted her. She blinked at me through blurred eyes, cheeks streaked with tears.
My heart nearly stopped, and I stared at the door that led into the private rooms, panicked, until she said, "Milo's resting. Dr. Vansis is keeping him sedated for now."
That strangling fear loosened enough for me to get a solid breath. Damn her for scaring me like that. Milo wasn't dead, so—oh wait. I sat in the chair next to her, unsure what to say about Baylor's death. They'd been close for many years, and Kismet and I had just established a friendly truce a few months back. I wasn't any good at comforting grieving people, but the other people closest to her (Wyatt, Tybalt, Rufus) were busy elsewhere.
So I told her about Alejandro and the gremlin warehouse. She didn't have any particularly warm fuzzy feelings for the gremlins, but she'd helped relocate them to that location. A slaughter of this magnitude was affecting, no matter your species.
"When it rains, it pours," she said.
"I'd say we've left downpour and hit hurricane force weather."
She grunted. "It's funny, but I always kind of expected Adrian to outlive the rest of us. And by us, I mean me, Wyatt, and Rufus. We were the Mercy's Lot Handlers, the four of us."
"I remember."
"Carly and Paul are taking it pretty hard." They'd both been members of his Triad before the Triads ceased to exist, so I could imagine their grief.
"A Hunter never expects to outlive their Handler."
"Losing Hunters was never easy for us, either."
She didn't have to convince me of that. I knew how much she cared about the Hunters in her care—how much Felix's death last month had hurt. "We lose people we love," I said. "It's the life we chose."
"But when does all of that loss stop being worth it? When do we say enough?"
I slid my arm across Kismet's shoulders and pulled her in a sideways hug. "W
hen there's no one left that we love to keep fighting for. Until then, we fight. It's who we are, Gina. Adrian knew that. He lived it every day."
"At least he can finally rest." The corners of her mouth quirked. "Did you know that when Adrian and Wyatt first met, they got into a fist fight?"
"No." The mental image made me laugh out loud. "Tell me."
She did. Reliving the past, and what must have been a pretty funny moment for the witnesses, loosened her up. Remembering her friend returned some of the brightness to her eyes and the light to her face.
After a while, Dr. Vansis shooed us out with orders to get our own rest while his patient got his. Since we weren't going to be able to visit Milo anytime soon, we both headed back to our sleeping quarters. I'd be going out with the hunting teams later, but could probably squeeze in a cat nap before we had to prep.
I woke in my bed with a warm hand gently shaking my shoulder. Before I opened my eyes, I knew it was Wyatt. He had sense enough to look ashamed of himself before I figured out what time it was. I punched him in the chest anyway.
"That's for not calling me for two fucking hours," I said.
"I'm sorry, Evy. I had to get the boys to trust me."
"Did you?"
"Yes."
"Where are they?"
"I set them up in a place with money and food. They're going to help us look for Vale and his family."
I perked up. "Well, that's something. Three more noses on the street is always helpful when we're looking for were-cats on the lam. What's Astrid think about it?"
"She isn't completely happy to be out of the loop, but she isn't fighting me for now. She's more concerned with finding Vale before he does any more damage to the Pride."
"Good."
"I hear you made a new friend tonight."
"Something like that."
I told him about my night while we both changed into hunting gear—black shirts and black cargo pants, boots, and plenty of hidden weapons. After four years of prepping while he watched from the sidelines, it still felt a little strange to head out hunting with Wyatt instead of leaving him behind. But we worked well together, and we'd always watch the other's back. Period.